wellnessfitpro
If ever I hear of a person who shares my working-class origins but who feels sorry for violent criminals, I know that they’re either a gangster themselves or a raging wet-wipe who’s had their nuts taken off by contorting themselves to fit in with the prison-visiting classes.
I hate prison reformers. I remember, from the 1980s onwards, the amusingly named Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform forever lecturing hoi polloi on the need to forgive and forget – forgive the criminal, forget the victim. Those were the days when bending over backwards to give wrong ’uns the benefit of the doubt was such a cultural cringe on the part of the patrician left that the National Council for Civil Liberties granted the Paedophile Information Exchange formal affiliate status.
To be fair, the civil libertarians practised what they preached when it came to letting evil flourish. When reading Harriet Harman’s autobiography for reviewing purposes, I was amazed to discover this alleged feminist being stalked by a nutter whose case she had been bothering the police about through her job with the NCCL. ‘He was menacing and angry’, she writes: ‘Having been his solicitor, I was fully aware of every detail of his record of violent crime. I knew that he didn’t just threaten violence, he carried it out.’ She didn’t tell the cops for years, until he actually threatened to kill her. ‘As I tipped out the carrier bags full of just some of the letters I’d kept, the police were aghast that I’d done nothing about it before.’
Add to this freak show the utterly barking Labour peer, the late Lord Longford, who used to regularly pop up to remind us that Myra Hindley was ‘a good woman’, and you’ll understand why I come to the current debate on crime and punishment somewhat jaded.
I really thought that the ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ school of thought had run its course (‘Gee, Officer Krupke, I’m very upset / I never had the love that ev’ry child oughta get / I ain’t no delinquent / I’m misunderstood / Deep down inside me, there is good!’). But we appear to be back there again. The television writer Jimmy McGovern has been doing the rounds shilling his new show Time, the ongoing prison drama which has its latest outing set in a young offender institution. During its promotion, McGovern has been a right little rage-baiter, claiming that sentences are ‘too long’ and that the staff at such places ‘sit on their backsides all day and do nothing… they’re lazy’.
There’s something repulsive about a successful writer (who is paid very well for doing a thing he loves) taking a poke at people who work in the grimmest of circumstances, often putting themselves in physical danger at the hands of their charming charges. The Prison Officers’ Association called the criticism ‘unfair’, not least as ‘prison officers routinely put themselves in harm’s way to prevent serious injury and save lives. Many have suffered life-changing injuries and been forced to leave the service following vicious assaults… [The inmates] are not simply naughty schoolchildren.’ Yet the motif of ‘angels with dirty faces’ who just need a good hug persists.
Why are we repeatedly encouraged to sympathise with the criminal rather than the victim? And why are some of the biggest dupes female, who have the most to fear from violent men receiving minimal punishment? It’s like a gender-based take on Gad Saad’s ‘suicidal empathy’ theory, from women being the most enthusiastic consumers of lurid ‘true crime’ content to those sad sacks who write love letters to serial killers to those types who accuse us unreasonable broads who believe that rapists should be jailed of practising ‘carceral feminism’. I’d previously believed that these looney tunes were to be found solely on the crazier campuses of the US, but I was proven wrong earlier this year when Kate Nevens, a Scottish Green MSP, called for the total abolition of Scotland’s prison system. It was scarcely less alarming when the Scottish Green co-leader (also female) stepped in to distance the party from an immediate abolition of jails, stating that prisons are a temporary necessity until we have ‘community justice’. (Which sounds unfortunately like lynching.)
In this climate of sentimental self-immolation, it doesn’t seem quite so shocking that the Starmer regime planned to let an army of rapists and domestic abusers out of jail before that lovely caring Andy Burnham partially reversed course – coincidentally, no doubt, after Kemi Badenoch held a press conference alongside crime victims and survivors to highlight this monstrosity. The high proportion of illegal immigrants found guilty of sex crimes – as if our own rape gangs, dominated by British Pakistanis, were not prolific enough – carries a horrifying echo of needing to import the manpower to do the dirty work that the natives won’t. Aren’t we producing enough rapists of our own? It was back in 2020 that Dame Vera Baird, the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, warned that rape was being ‘effectively decriminalised’ due to the 98 per cent of charges never reaching court. Surely this is one area of national production that doesn’t need the extra manpower?
And what do we make of the young female charity workers – the sort of woman who’d have a fit if a white man whistled at her – who go to the French beaches to do grind-y dances with the young illegals, who by the expressions on their faces are thinking ‘Hooray – hoes!’. A recent report by the Mail on Sunday claimed that government money was being spent on handing out hijabs to the occasional woman who arrives here on illegal small boats, presumably lest they be mistaken by their countrymen as the kind of women it’s fine to rape.
The jails being as crowded as they are, it’s sometimes suggested that no women whatsoever should be inside. That’s fine when we’re talking about the sizeable proportion pursued there by the BBC for non-payment of licence fees. But a female murderer is still a murderer who has wreaked the same devastation on numerous lives – of all those who loved the slain victim – as a male murderer. It was surreal to see American liberal women carrying on over child killer Lindsay Clancy as if she were a cross between Betty Friedan and Malala Yousafzai. Now Christa Pike is being hailed as some kind of superhuman because some subpar medics botched her execution. (A wag noted online of the all-female execution team requested by Pike that this is what you get when you go for the DEI-hire.)
‘It’s a feminist issue!’, my friend the penal reformer told me when I wondered why anyone cared how Pike was doing. I must have missed that day at Feminist School when we were taught how to show female solidarity by – assisted by your boyfriend – torturing a fellow female teenager for half an hour by beating, slashing and carving a pentagram into her chest before crushing her skull with a lump of asphalt.
Defending Pike and Clancy is a strange hill to die on. I recall no feminist support for Lucy Connolly, taken from her children and sentenced to 31 months (of which she served a year) for some angry online words, quickly removed.
So being the unreconstructed blue-collar revenger that I am, I was pleased to hear Kemi Badenoch’s speech promising to build 50,000 new prison places because ‘a violent criminal doesn’t become less dangerous just because the government has run out of prison cells’. The shadow justice minister, Nick Timothy, summed it up well: ‘Prison works by punishing and deterring, but most importantly by incapacitating. Prison should keep violent and repeat offenders away from the public.’
After decades of living in a Dickian dystopia where it often seemed that it was the ultimate government aim to lock up the law-abiding and assure the freedom of the violent – ‘Kill now and win a Ford Fiesta’, as the old Private Eye headline went – might there be some sense about to be brought to the debate about crime and punishment at last?
#women #feel #suicidal #empathy #violent #men
